HOMESCHOOL
FAMILIES WANTED Several Orting area families are interested
in starting a Christian Based Cooperative in order to give
homeschool families more class opportunities, ie. Foreign
Language, Video Editing, Global Positioning Systems, Math
Tutoring, etc. Are you interested in participating or would
like more information?
Please contact Dawn at dawnwa96@yahoo.com.

Orting,
Washington

Incorporated
April 22, 1889.
Orting was “formed” by William Henry Whitesell, Thomas
Headley, Daniel Lane, and Daniel Varner, who all filed Donation Land
Claims in 1854.
They were the only four families that filed Land Claims around what is now
Orting.

Part
of “The Whitesell Story”*, written by Mrs. J.C. Taylor
(Margaret Whitesell) sometime during the mid-1930’s and submitted
by her niece, Effie (George) Anderson states that the friendly Indian
that visited the Whitesells warning of the Indian War was named “Jake” (see
the Indian
War for more information on this).

Transportation
in and out of Orting was extremely difficult until the early 1870’s,
when coal was discovered on the headwaters of the Puyallup River. The
Northern Pacific Railroad needed coal for their operations, so they
built a railroad line through Orting in 1877. Population growth skyrocketed
after that.

Because
the railroad line ran right through the Whitesell property, it became
known as Whitesell’s Crossing. Henry Whitesell became the first
postmaster in the area, with the post office being called “Carbon”.
It was later changed to Orting however.

It
seems Puyallup and Sumner are not the only towns in the area that have
mysterious names. Orting also has no hard documentation on how the
name came into being.
There seem to be three variations on the name:

Some say that when the close-by town
of Carbonado chose it’s name, the
mail became confused.

Another version is that the town of Carbon,
MT (formerly, Carbon, WT for Washington Territory) was the same name
as the town of Carbon
in Washington.

The most feasible as to how Orting was
picked, however, is an account that Civil Engineer Black of the railroad
said the Indian
meaning of
Orting was “A prairie in the woods”.

* “The
Whitesell Story” can be found in the book “The History
of the Town of Orting” at the Orting Library